It’s nearly 10 pm, and the burning fires are visible from the road that connects New Abbas Nagar to Meena Chauraha on the Bhopal Bypass Road. It’s the first of the two stubble-burning seasons in the state capital.
Despite a ban on stubble burning, the fires, small and scattered by day, grow bolder in the dark — their orange glow visible to motorists passing through the area.
The administrative response to such incidents is typically seasonal. In the winter months, when AQI numbers inch past hazardous, officials are quick to issue challans, patrol fields, and declare ‘zero tolerance’. Reports are filed, awareness drives are launched, and district authorities hold emergency meetings to manage air quality levels.
But come summer, the urgency fades. Officials, armed with the same powers, turn lenient. The logic is quietly accepted: that the heat disperses particulate matter more efficiently, and the AQI monitors don’t flash red as often. And so, violations are ignored, and the crackdowns of winter give way to a studied silence that prevails for most of the year.
This duality in enforcement has given farmers a window — a loophole of heat and indifference — to clear fields ahead of the monsoon sowing cycle. For many, mechanised alternatives are either unavailable or unaffordable. Burning is quick, effective, and, during summer, unnoticed.
Yet the cost of this seasonal apathy is cumulative. The residue of summer fires may not show up on AQI charts the way winter haze does, but it stays in the air, in lungs, in the thinning blue of Bhopal’s summer sky.
As a global city in the making, Bhopal has promised to control pollution through a mix of technology, community engagement, and stricter enforcement. But these promises mean little when the most basic form of air pollution — open field burning — continues unchecked.
In a system that loves committees and circulars, actual accountability remains scarce. Why can’t village Sarpanchs be held responsible for crop residue burning in their jurisdictions? Why must enforcement always travel from the top down, and only in winter? Until responsibility is localised — and constant — the fires will keep returning, filling the skies with smoke.